Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini Episode 7

November 20, 2009

Episode seven of Darker than BLACK: Ryuusei no Geminii certainly wastes no time in throwing some surprising information our way, opening with a scene which suggests that Suou and Shion’s father is still alive and well (and at large in Tokyo no less), while examination of the brain of the person assumed to be said father only contained a day’s worth of information. Some curious goings-on to get you thinking, no doubt about it.Of course, the sighting of Shion’s father in Tokyo has sent a number of agencies in a scramble to find him, and of course one way those agencies hope to get to him is via Suou, which leaves Hei and company (as always) in danger. With patrols and checkpoints all over the place, it’s a struggle for our quartet of heroes (is anyone a hero in Darker Than BLACK really?) to leave their current location in Hokkaido – This leads them to hire the help of a professional to get them back on track on their journey.

Of course, nobody can be trusted in the world of this series, and so it goes that the individuals hired by Hei actually have another agenda, namely the kidnap and capture of July, Dolls being the valuable commodities that they are. While Hei is happy to give July up as lost, Suou will have none of it and thus abandons Hei to try and rescue him for herself. This leads her into the hands of a particularly nasty contractor, a man whose brutal tendencies before he became a contractor show themselves vividly in his remuneration. So it’s left for Hei to save the day in one of those short but spectacular action set pieces so beloved of the Darker Than BLACK franchise.

While the plot development exhibited by this episode is hugely intriguing in its own right, I can’t help but think that Suou’s character development is continuing to be the most fascinating aspect of this series. Once again here, we see her veering from between relatively normal human emotions (there’s certainly arguably not much logic to setting out to rescue July, particularly alone) and the absolute cold-heartedness expected of a contractor which almost leads her to murder someone without a second thought (although again you could argue the logic of this move in the circumstances). This internal struggle of sorts also continues to bind her own way of thinking and acting to Hei in many senses – As Suou grows closer to July does it mirror Hei’s need to protect Yin.

There’s so much we could sit and discuss about almost every episode of Darker than BLACK: Ryuusei no Gemini (I haven’t even mentioned Kirihara here) that it’s hard to know where to start, so instead let’s just salute it as the excellent series that it is. It perhaps still hasn’t captured my heart to quite the same extent as its predecessor, but that doesn’t make Ryuusei no Gemini any less eminently watchable.